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A contact between the International Space Station and youngsters at Gilwell Park, north London, is scheduled for Tuesday 8 August (next week), as part of Youngsters on the Air 2017.

The youngsters will take part in a Q&A session with astronaut Paolo Nespoli, IZØJPA, Flight Engineer of Expedition 52/53, lasting around 10 minutes.

The contact will be at 1838 UTC (that’s 1938 local time) on 2m FM, likely on the standard ARISS frequency of 145.800 MHz, and should be readily receivable using handheld Yagis, turnstiles, or even rubber duck antennas over the UK and northern Europe.

For anyone into military radio, Patrick kindly pointed out that these Clansman SURF units are available quite cheaply on well know auction sites currently. It is essentially a variable bandpass filter I believe, designed for using VHF manpacks together in close proximity. It is a beautiful piece of engineering if slightly radioactive!

I love the worm drive – a variable capacitor and variable inductor is driven from the tuning knob via this drive.

We had some Clansman fun at the Barbecue – thanks John, Patrick and Alison for helping out – learnt a lot about the Clansman kit. The mast is a Clansman 5.4 metre with Clansman dipole (eventually set correctly for 60m!) and an elevated groud spike antenna on top for 4 metres.

As of Friday 3rd February, a new GB3RD was put on air. It uses a similar type of base station but has new logic. The Repeater is now CTCSS only access so you will need to set an encode tone of 118.8Hz on your transceiver. The ident. is now by voice and occurs every 15 minutes.

The repeater is located on a farm and there are many potential sources of interference. To minimise these we have had a 3dB attenuator located in the antenna feeder. This has now been removed so the repeater should be 3dB (which isn’t much) stronger and also receive should benefit by the same amount. The implementation of full CTCSS should minimise potential interference.

Over the Christmas break I was lucky enough to be invited to a small private radio museum in Southern Hungary. I took a few pictures to look at if anyone is interested. There is one ‘propaganda box’ with featured a selected switch for tuning so that only approved stations could be heard! Naturally people hope modified them. I wish I had room to do this at my QTH! 73, Simon M0ZSU

The RADARC Annual General Meeting was held at Woodford park on Thursday the 8th of December. A great evening was had by all and was kicked off by Simon M0ZSU, and we started with a Chairman’s report. Overall the club has had its challenges over the last year however we have managed thanks to the brilliant help from volunteers from the rest of the membership.

We have a thriving membership of 87 members and we have been growing steadily.

Over the last year, a team of volunteers from the membership have formed a new group that was to take over the organisation of meetings. This worked out well even with the shift of Simon to being Chairman after the unfortunate loss of our previous Chairman, Pete Milton, G8FRC.

We also now have a new website setup by James 2E0JPM which will bring us new functionality and options for the future.

Our plans for a club shack are also still on the table and we are looking to re-start this project soon.

We plan to have much more variety and new styles of talks/evenings in the coming year and hope that we can develop the club to entice new members, young and old.

The New committee was confirmed with a vote by membership lead by Nick Challcombe. All of the committee have been “sworn in” for another year. The new (and old) committee were thanked with a large round of applause from the membership.

Overall, we as a committee would like to say thank you to the membership for their support and understanding over the past year. It has been a struggle but we have coped well. We look forward to the next year, 2017, and hopefully we can grow the club and the hobby.

Join us throughout 2017 for new and exciting talks!

At the end of the AGM we had the Trophy and award presentations and finally Cheese and wine!